What liberal media bias? Or why I like my news from the blogosphere
Reuters (via Yahoo News):
LONDON — The British Broadcasting Corporation has upheld a complaint against one of its journalists who said in a radio report she cried when a dying Yasser Arafat was flown from the West Bank in 2004.
Barbara Plett made the remark in a dispatch for the “From Our Own Correspondent” program describing how she felt when a helicopter carrying Arafat, who was gravely ill, took off from his compound, according to a BBC Web site.
“When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry,” she said in the 30 October, 2004 broadcast.
I know I have to choke back tears whenever a terrorist dies. Don’t you?
It doesn’t bother me that major media outlets are usually possessed of a liberal bias.* It bothers me that they resolutely refuse to declare it. This is one of the major differences between bloggers and traditional journalists. The former wear their bias on their sleeves; the latter pretend they have none. But it’s difficult for humans to escape their bias. Even decisions about what to present as news and how to present it will reflect the worldview of the source.
On any given day at Memeorandum, you’ll find right-wing bloggers emphasizing one story while left-wing bloggers are emphasizing another. “News” is in the eye of the beholder. And then, if you pay attention to diction, you’ll notice subtle but important differences in how conservative and liberal bloggers characterize whatever news they’re emphasizing. Right-wing bloggers may report that President Bush said; left-wing bloggers may report that President Bush claimed. Both words impart the same general idea, but they don’t impart the same impression. In neither case, though, is anybody pretending to be objective or “fair and balanced.”
Like the legacy media, the blogosphere is biased. But unlike the legacy media, it’s transparently biased. And there’s a lot to be said for that.
(*I assume here that only a liberal could weep for a dead Arafat.)
A reporter showing emotion over a figure that is controversial, and whose intent/purpose is widely disputed, does not show liberal bias.
Nor does bolding “transparently biased” or “liberal bias” make it any more true.
I always think of the media’s coverage of Pride, and focusing on the 10 people that happen to be in drag or leather, as opposed to the thousands that are just happy to be in an environment free from bigotry and hatred. Is this a liberal bias?
Hmmm, notice that a terror-master who regularly exhorted Palestinians to slaughter Jewish civilians is merely ‘controversial’. Sort of like Lindsay Lohan’s belly-ring.
The ‘news of the day’ is merely a collage, & it depends on who’s assembling the pieces. Why is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on the news every night? It’s a tiny regional conflict of no relevance to the rest of the world, unless you accept a) the Arab pathology that Israel is to blame for all its problems, or b) the Vietnam-era canard that the main conflict in the world is between the corrupt, exploitative West & the oppressed Third World, with the Israelis standing in for the West & the Palestinians improbably cast as freedom fighters.
This rehashed Rousseauism - via Marx & Chomsky - is how the Iraq War is peddled in the MSM. But this is fatuous because jihad is pre-Marx (& pre-Freud) & can’t fit into liberal ideology.